COLORADO SPRINGS — The low point in Dave Denniston’s adjustment to life as a paraplegic came his first night at Craig Hospital two weeks after he broke his back in a sledding accident. Paralyzed and in extreme pain, he shared a room with two other patients, one of them on a ventilator.

“Essentially I had Darth Vader next to me,” Denniston recalled last week at the Olympic Training Center, where he coaches Paralympic swimmers from a wheelchair. “The other guy was in excruciating pain, screaming all night. I was in hell at that point. I couldn’t sleep, and there was the unknown. Would I stand again? How do I do this? What’s next?”

Amy Van Dyken-Rouen, a friend of Denniston’s since high school, is facing those same unknowns now after severing her spinal cord in an ATV accident nine days ago. She’s fortunate to have Denniston as an information resource.

“That’s where Amy’s had a little bit of an advantage, a lot of those questions are answered, the what-ifs,” Denniston said. “For me, those unknowns in that new environment, it was hell, the worst I’ve ever been. Everything after that was great. All joking aside, it just got better.”

A graduate of Arapahoe High School who was an NCAA champion in swimming for Auburn, Denniston nearly made the Olympics twice before his accident in 2005. After hitting a tree while sledding in the Snowy Range of Wyoming, coughing up blood while a friend raced for help, Denniston videotaped a goodbye message to family and friends because he feared he might die there.

“A lot of people have asked me how long it took me to cope with being (paralyzed), I was just grateful to be alive,” Denniston said. “It didn’t take me long to accept that I’d broken my back, because I honestly thought I might be done.”

Denniston returned to competitive swimming in 2007 and competed at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing. As the resident coach at the OTC, he is surrounded by disabled athletes, but this is the first time he’s known a friend before and after becoming paralyzed. He has cried more for Van Dyken-Rouen over the past week than he did for himself in the nine years since his injury.

“I have to have patience”

Denniston has a good idea of what she is experiencing now, and so does Alana Nichols, a Paralympian from Wheat Ridge who broke her back snowboarding at age 17. Two years later she was introduced to disabled sports, eventually becoming a Paralympian in skiing and wheelchair basketball.

“She’s probably really confused,” Nichols said. “When I was paralyzed, that first week in ICU I really had to put things together. I hadn’t met anyone with paralysis, I didn’t know what that really meant. A lot of people came to visit, and everybody tried to ignore the elephant in the room. A lot of high school friends came in and just wanted to laugh about everything.

“She’s probably in the midst of processing what she is going to do and what her life looks like after this. During my time in the hospital, while I was healing, I was very confused. I cried every day and I prayed a lot. I asked for clarity. It’s just an incredibly overwhelming time for her.”

Denniston and Nichols believe Van Dyken-Rouen’s athletic ability, which she parlayed into six Olympic gold medals in swimming, will help her physically and mentally while she is learning new ways of living through the rehab process.

“My therapists were like, ‘Well, this usually takes people three days, and we got it in an hour, so what do you want to do now?’ ” Denniston said. “The biggest thing I learned is, I can do just about anything I want, but it’s going to take more time, and I have to have patience. I developed the patience at Craig. A lot of the people around me, I would see them getting a lot more frustrated.”

Van Dyken-Rouen also will be able to draw on the mental toughness that drove her as an athlete, but a lot of people in a rehab setting don’t have that.

“There are the people who have self-pity, they stay in their room, they cry, ‘I don’t want this, I want my life,’ it takes them longer to get through it,” Denniston said. “There’s a much smaller group where they’re like: ‘OK, this isn’t the life I wanted, but look at all these things I can do. I can still go whitewater rafting, I can still drive a car, I can still do the things I love to do.’ Those are the ones that tend to form their own little group and create support among each other.”

No reason to stop swimming

Denniston found perspective by noticing people around him who were worse off, such as those with traumatic brain injuries. He would think: My situation isn’t the end of the world, it could be so much worse. That helped him focus on positives instead of negatives.

Nichols wrestled with depression for two years after her injury. Having been a fast-pitch softball player before her injury, getting back into sports was a “game-changer.” She hopes Van Dyken-Rouen will do that, not necessarily training to be a Paralympian but finding recreational activities she enjoys.

It wasn’t until Nichols began to train as a disabled athlete that she quit obsessing on what she’d lost and focused on things she could do.

“The next couple of years, if she doesn’t get the function back in her legs, are going to be a process of mourning her loss,” Nichols said. “You have to embrace that change, and it’s very difficult.”

Denniston can’t wait to see the look on Van Dyken-Rouen’s face the first time she gets back in a swimming pool.

“That’s where I truly felt free again,” Denniston said. “That’s when I fell in love with swimming again, because I didn’t have this chair attached to me, I was in control, it was easy for me to roll back and forth, I could do all the strokes I wanted to. People were blown away that I swam butterfly with a catheter bag on my leg.”

When she pursued her Olympic dream, Van Dyken-Rouen was driven by memories of being bullied in high school and the desire to prove severe asthma couldn’t stop her from winning gold medals.

“I don’t know that that’s the situation here,” Denniston said. “I don’t know that she feels like she has to prove anything. She still has that fire in her somewhere, and when she needs it, she’ll use it. But I don’t think it’s what’s going to drive her. I think her love for her family, her husband, that is going to carry her more than, ‘Hey, I’ve got to prove something.’ “

Denniston is sure the next time he sees her, there will be a lot of jokes.

The Post's ski and Olympics writer, Meyer covered his 12th games this summer in Rio de Janeiro. He has covered five World Alpine Ski Championships and more than 100 World Cup ski events and is a member of the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame. He also regularly covers the Colorado Rapids.

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